API Automation Testing : Pynt & Keploy

Pynt & Keploy : API automated testing is critical for product quality and CI/CD processes. Unlike GUI tests, API tests can cope with short release cycles and frequent changes — without breaking the test outputs.

What is API testing?

In software application development, API is the middle layer between the UI and the database layer. They enable communication and data exchange from one software system to another.

API testing involves evaluating the functionality and performance of application programming interfaces (APIs). API testing is an important part of end-to-end testing frameworks. Its main job is to ensure that the different parts of a software system can communicate effectively and collaborate seamlessly. By testing the APIs, it guarantees that all the components of the system can work together smoothly without any issues.

It ensures that the various components of the system integrate well with each other, allowing seamless interaction and functioning.

API testing validates data exchange, functionality, security, and reliability of APIs. This validation ensures they meet the required specifications. It also ensures APIs work in friendly way with other components.

Types of API Testing

There are six types of testing commonly used in software development:

1. Unit Testing: It is a type of testing that concentrates on checking each unit or component of code individually. Its purpose is to ensure that these units work correctly on their own, without relying on other parts of the code. It is typically done at the code level and helps identify any bugs or issues within specific modules or functions.
2. Integration Testing: Integration testing involves testing how different units or modules interact and work together as a combined system. It ensures that the integration between components, such as the backend and frontend, is smooth and error-free.
3. Functional Testing: Functional testing evaluates the functionality of a software application by testing its features and user interactions. It verifies that the application behaves as expected and meets the specified requirements. This can include end-to-end testing, which examines the entire application workflow from start to finish.
4. Performance Testing: Performance testing measures the responsiveness, stability, scalability, and speed of a software application under various workload conditions. It ensures that the system can handle the expected number of users and perform optimally.
5. Security Testing: Security testing aims to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a system’s security measures. It includes testing for potential breaches, data integrity, authentication, and authorization mechanisms. This type of testing helps safeguard against potential threats and ensures the protection of sensitive information.
6. Usability Testing: Usability testing assesses how user-friendly and intuitive a software application is. It focuses on the user experience (UX) aspects, such as navigation, ease of use, and overall satisfaction. Usability testing ensures that the application meets the needs of its intended users and provides a positive user experience.

By including different types of testing such software developers can thoroughly evaluate and improve the quality and dependability of their applications.

Performing API Testing

API unit testing is performed to validate the individual components or units of an API in isolation. It focuses on testing the functionality and behavior of specific API endpoints or methods. This testing ensures that each unit of the API performs as expected and adheres to the specified requirements.

To conduct API unit testing, developers typically use specialized API testing tools. These tools provide a convenient and efficient way to create test cases, execute them against the API endpoints, and verify the responses. They offer features such as test case management, assertions, and the ability to mock or simulate dependencies.

During API unit testing, developers write test cases that cover different scenarios, including normal and boundary cases, error handling, and edge cases. They define the expected inputs and outputs for each test case, and then execute the tests using the API testing tools. The tools help in making HTTP requests to the API, capturing the responses, and comparing them against the expected results.

API testing tools also enable developers to automate the execution of test cases, allowing for faster and more frequent testing. This automation helps in detecting issues or regressions early in the development process, ensuring the reliability and stability of the API.

Where does Pynt & Keploy come into the Play?

Pynt & Keploy is a no-code testing platform that generates tests from API calls. It converts API calls into test cases and Mock test cases are automatically generated with the actual request/responses.

Key Features

• Convert API calls from anywhere to Test-Case
• Automatically mocks network/external dependencies for all CRUD operations with correct responses.
• It identifies noisy fields in the responses accurately like (timestamps, and random values) to ensure high-quality tests.
• It has native integrations with popular testing libraries like go-test. The code coverage will be reported for both the existing test cases and the ones recorded using Keploy. It can also be easily integrated into existing continuous integration (CI) pipelines.
• Keploy has an Instrumentation/Integration framework to easily add new libraries/drivers within ~100 lines of code.

What is Pynt ?

Pynt is an API security solution for developers and testers. It generates and runs security tests automatically from existing Postman and Newman collections.

When using Pynt, it is crucial to focus on having thorough functional tests for the API. The extent of these tests determines the coverage of security tests. API testing becomes particularly important when dealing with multiple APIs, users, and requests, as well as when exploring different input values. This testing enables a thorough examination of security measures to ensure the system’s safety and protection.

It can provide any valid functional Postman test collection for API/s you have. The product generates security tests from it, runs them, and provides you with the results. Pynt’s developer-first approach allows organizations to secure the assets behind their APIs before they are released into production, ensuring that their products are secure at their most vulnerable components – APIs.

Pynt’s API solution carries out automated hacks of your APIs to find the most critical issues and zero day vulnerabilities in less than two minutes, with no configuration required.

Conclusion

Pynt & Keploy : I prefer using Keploy because Keploy has offered me a better experience as a developer. Nowadays, many products lack this important focus on providing a good user experience for developers. Since the majority of users for these tools and libraries are developers themselves, it is crucial to prioritize their needs and make the usage of such tools as easy and enjoyable as possible. Keploy has been able to meet these requirements and has proven to be a valuable tool for developers.